Betrayal at the Shinra Mansion
by sanctum-c
Summary: Sans introduces his friends to a new game. Written for the FFVII Halloween Week on Tumblr.


"Let's play Betrayal." Sans gravitated to the stack of boardgames and picked up a green tinted box.

"Betrayal?" Undyne squinted at the proffered game. "Betrayal at the Shinra Mansion?"

"It's my favourite game." Sans shot her a grin and set the box on the table.

"Fine." Undyne sighed. "You've been telling us to play that all day."

"How... do we play?" Alphys peered at the game components as Sans lifted playing pieces, cards, tiles, dice and pentagonal cards.

Sans considered this. "Might be best to learn as we go along. Everyone pick a character."

Six sloppily painted figures paired (more or less) with one face of the relevant pentagonal cards. After much scrutiny, Undyne selected Tifa Lockhart ("She's the strongest"); Alphys took Yuffie Kisaragi ("She's small. Like me."); Papyrus took Cloud Strife after Undyne let go of him ("The sword will be helpful!"); Frisk took Aeris Gainsborough ("..."); leaving Toriel with either Barret Wallace or Cid Highwind – of which she took the former ("He has a daughter"). Sans took Cid ("No choice there.")

"Okay. Everyone starts in the entrance hall..."

_The hall lead into the gloom, four doorways opening on either side of the corridor. Ahead a staircase lead up to the first floor, barely visible in the gloom of their torches. Aeris shivered, wind whistling distantly through the structure. "Not sure this was the best idea..."_

"...and each turn you move. If you go through a door where there's no tile, you take a tile from the stack. If it's for the floor you're on-" Sans held up the first tile drawn, marked on the back as Ground Floor/Basement. "-you lay it down like this." He moved Cid one square to his right and into a newly uncovered room. The Study. "So, in this room, I get an item card." He thumbed the top card from the deck. "And it's a weapon. So I get more attack dice when I have to fight."

"Are there enemies in this?" Toriel peered at her character card.

"Depends on the outcome. But I'm getting ahead of myself-"

_Cid moved first, pushing open the door to their right before Aeris could react. "Looks like a study." He coughed. "No one's been here in years. Lotta junk- Hey." He reached into a pile of debris and drew a spear from the detritus. "This on the other hand. This could come in handy."_

"So. Now the next person-"

"Where's the basement?" Undyne interjected. "That staircase leads to that landing-" She pointed at the unconnected tile denoting the upstairs. "But nothing seems to lead to that-" She gestured at the other unconnected tile. The question only made Sans's grin larger.

"We'll get to that. Later."

Undyne was next; she moved her character in the opposite direction to Cid, opening the door on the left-side of the hallway. She flipped through the tiles until she found a Ground Floor tile. "Okay, so I have found-"

_Tifa pushed the door open. "A garden." She blinked. Wait. What?_

"Okay, I think I need a different tile-"

"It's fine." Sans clamped his hand down on the tile stack. "The house doesn't have to make sense. It... Well, it might be haunted."

"Can we go back out the front door?" Alphys still suffered from nerves when speaking up.

"Not yet. Anyway; Undyne, you've found an Omen..."

_Somewhere in the night a distant bell tolled. Time had not been kind to the garden, cluttered with debris, plant pots, trellises and overgrown flowerbeds. And something else. Some red lurked in behind the debris, near invisible from the house. Tifa crept closer. Something not quite a wolf and not quite a lion looked up at her with pleading eyes. She could not help the smile and stepped forward, patting the creature's head. It purred, tail whipping back and forth. Strange – almost as if the tip was on fire._

"Now in addition to your companion, you have to make a haunt roll."

"Okay-" Undyne took the six dice Sans offered. She rolled them. "Seven. Is that good?"

"It's fine. For now." Sans pushed a clip along a numbered track. "Okay Frisk; your turn."

_Aeris crossed through the garden, nodding to Tifa, a little wary of the creature she was fussing over. A gate lay to her left and back towards the front of the house. To her right, another door seemed to lead back into the structure. Left for now-_

Frisk pulled the top tile from the deck and laid it past the front door.

_A kitchen. Aeris ducked back out into the garden. No sign of a wall of a house on this side of the gate. No sense of light. But through the gate; a modern(ish) kitchen. Impossible to avoid the chill in the air – or the renewed tolling of the distant bell. The air shifted around her-_

Frisk blinked at their card and passed it to Papyrus. "Frisk has found the book. It increases knowledge but decreases sanity."

"And now the haunt roll." Sans plunked the dice down in front of Frisk. "Three? Still fine-" He shifted the marker once again.

_The book was fascinating but grimy, the text shifting and blurring however hard she tried to focus on the page. The throb of a headache began; too much to hope the house or her companions had painkillers?_

"Okay Alphys. Your turn."

Alphys took the opportunity to run Yuffie to the next floor and explore there. She found a pistol in the main bedroom. Papyrus stayed on the ground floor and sent Cloud into the collapsed room, dumping him in the basement. Toriel ventured into the other unexplored room gaining a new Omen. She rolled eight. Sans followed Alphys upstairs.

_Bad to split up like this; Aeris wandered on taking doorways at random, her sense of the Mansion from the exterior making little sense of the confusing interior. Conservatories jammed between a library and a room containing a pipe-organ. Strange apparitions, the distant bell, creaks and furtive noises from parts of the house none of her companions could reach-_

Despite her initial reluctance, Undyne was getting into the game. Weapons to be had and strength checks she could pass with ease. Not as fast moving around as the others, but everything was fine. But what was the meaning of the track Sans kept adjusting? She set down the next tile – the Laboratory. Another Omen. "Letter from a Lost Love?"

"Roll for the Omen," Sans prompted.

She rolled. "Two."

Sans grinned. "Ah. Here we go." He flipped open a book from the box. "So. Laboratory with the Letter... Here we go. So. Now one of us turns traitor and the rest of us have to stop them. We each get our own rules for this next part. And for this game, the traitor is... Cloud!"

"Me?" Papyrus leant back.

"It's nothing personal. Now take this and read it over there." Papyrus wandered away from the table peering at the text. "Okay, the rest of us need to work together to stop him. We don't know what he needs to do to win, and he doesn't know what we need to do to win." He flipped through the book to the relevant section. "Y_ou have awoken me from my slumber and I am moved at last to take revenge for the misdeeds of the past._ We have accidentally awoken a former Shinra employee whose been experimented on and can transform into a monster. What we need to do is calm him down and make him aware that his lost love isn't dead. Unfortunately, one of your companions has also been experimented on by Shinra and is thus under the vengeful monster's control..."

_The howl seemed to shake the foundations of the house. Cloud's eyes lost focus. "Cloud? Cloud?" Aeris darted towards him, worried. The grin was the only warning; she dove for the floor as he swept his sword through the air, the blade missing her by a hair. The dark force at the centre of the house had claimed one of her friends. Aeris scrambled to her feet and fled back the way she came._


End file.
